Sunday, February 6, 2011

After ACTE 2010 Newsletter: It’s about time

Thank you for visiting us at the ACTE Annual Convention in Las Vegas last December. Like you, we had an enlightening experience and came back home with extra knowledge to put into practice. We have a personal policy to never spam our contacts and to never exceed four newsletters or announcements per year. We know your time is valuable so we will cut to the point.

In this newsletter you will find:
A Personal Message from Nai
Nai’s Interview by ACTE
ACTE iPad Winners Circle
Twitter Put to the Test at ACTE
KP Goes Online!

A Personal Message from Nai

Ida Fryhover and Molly Kyler

ACTE in Las Vegas was amazing! I’m so glad KP was able to sponsor the convention and help the ACTE Support Fund Auction this year. Auctioning off Chef Jeff alone raised over $700! Congratulations Molly Kyler and Ida Fryhover for making your donation and winning a dinner for two with Chef Jeff.

I thoroughly enjoyed speaking in front of the audience at both general sessions. Speaking to 5,000 people was a nerve racking experience. This year’s conference represents a key point in my life with KP. A decade earlier, we launched our first digital curriculum and now we are launching KP Compass Online. We’ve accomplished many great things in such a short amount of time, and I’m proud of my talented and dedicated team for devoting themselves to the pursuit of furthering education through technology. I think back to my humble beginnings, the years eating ramen and corn dogs to survive, based on a belief that what we are doing will become something bigger in the end.

At ACTE we made a big splash, announcing the release of a few new products, showing off our home made booth designed by our very own graphics engineer, and I got a chance to speak to the business and marketing teachers about my life. We even tested a new way of raffling off prizes using technology! I hope you enjoyed the time you spent with us at the booth. I only wish I could have been there to greet each one of you.

Nai’s Interview by ACTE

Curious to hear a little about Nai’s story? ACTE interviewed Nai and published the podcast at the end of January. You can listen to him tell his story about starting a small business, entrepreneurship, and technology in the classroom. You can find it at ACTE’s Publications site at www.acteonline.org, read it in Techniques magazine or you can read the transcript.

ACTE iPad Winners Circle

Congratulations Debbie Fanning and Sherry Lober on winning the iPads.

Of all the gadgets I’ve owned, I’ve never been so fond of such a device. It changed how I interact with content and made it personal again. During the second half of 2010 we ran a promotion to win an iPad and it reached its peak at the ACTE conference with over 700 entries. Two lucky winners went home winning the iPad in Las Vegas. We would like to take a moment to highlight the winners here.

We tried a new way of conducting the raffle, a way that was more exciting than just drawing a ticket out of a bin. We decided to incorporate technology into this age old practice and throw a bit of fun into the process. We ran together an algorithm in the computer that took the names of all the entries. The system randomly assigned these names to three categories. The three categories were represented by practical devices in the form of a bag of scrabble tiles, dice, and a coin. The process was to select a letter, then roll the dice, then flip the coin to determine the winner. It is total chance. This was the first time this method of raffling has ever been done in the world. We learned from this experience and will attempt it again at a future conference.

Debbie Fanning

Winner #1 : Debbie Fanning, a FACS teacher in Scottsboro, AL. She plans on using the iPad with her Fashion and Interior Design, Child Services, and Foods and Nutrition courses. She has been a teacher for 11 years and serves as an FCCLA advisor. She entered teaching because she wanted a career that would make a difference to others. She is the AATFACS president and is an AACTE board member. Congratulations Debbie!

Sherry Lober

Winner #2: Sherry Lober, a high school teacher of 21 years. She team teaches Marketing Education at Albuquerque High School with her brother, Eric Strauss and is very passionate about teaching and developing future business leaders. “I'm always looking for the latest and greatest!!!” She plans on using the iPad in her marketing class to give them a different outlook on technology and marketing platforms. Congratulations Sherry!

Twitter Put to the Test at ACTE

During both general sessions at ACTE, Nai spoke about technology in education. He expounded on how he has devoted his entire adult life to integrating technology into education. A controversy erupted as to how old Nai is. During his speech, he challenged the conference attendees to guess his age, but they had to use technology to participate. The vehicle of choice was Twitter. Many teachers signed up for Twitter for the first time to participate in this contest, and KP received over 200 tweets with guesses ranging from 21 to 48 years old. Congratulations Chad Lindsley for coming closest. We were encouraged by the number of participants and first time tweeters during the conference.

KP Goes Online!

It’s official, KP Compass Online has launched. This new enhancement to our award winning curriculum now has a new way for teachers and students to interact. But it is more than just an online delivery system. KP Compass puts teachers in the driver’s seat of the curriculum so that they control the destination. Instead of the textbook dictating what they need to teach and in what order they teach it, they can choose their own path and deviate from it if need be. KP Compass allows teachers to use the standards KP has established or create their own unit plans and add their own materials. Once customized, they can select students to enroll in that plan and grant access to the course from anywhere there is internet! The students will then log in, review the material, and take a test for mastery of the subject. After the assessment, students are directed to review any material that they have not mastered and are then directed to retake that portion of the test.

The key to KP Compass is customizability. The intelligent system takes the content the teacher chooses and automatically formulates the lesson, the vocabulary and the test based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s flexible, and there has never been an intelligent system like this, offline or online. We have even bigger plans with KP Compass. If you are interested or want to find out more, please contact us!